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Daily chart: Toil and trouble

How non-employment has changed since the financial crisisSINCE 2007 the financial crisis, global recession and euro crisis have all taken their toll on rich-world labour markets. In its annual Employment Outlook report, the OECD predicts that the unemployment rate is likely to stay at around 8% of the labour force until the end of 2014 across the 34 member countries. But unemployment alone does not tell the full story since the jobless can stop looking for work, in which case they are classified as inactive. A more comprehensive measure of those not in work is “non-employment”, the sum of the unemployed and inactive as a share of the working-age population (15-64 year-olds). Worryingly, roughly half of the joblessness is now long-term (over a year), which is more difficult to escape as individuals lose confidence, their skills atrophy and they find themselves shunned by prospective employers. Over half of the unemployed in the troubled euro-zone economies of Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal have been out of work for more than a year. For several countries, however, inactivity changes have played a big part, mainly through declines that have reduced non-employment or tempered its rise. Such an effect is most notable in Turkey but is also marked in Poland and Hungary.